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"...the air was getting vile. The singing in his ears had become the noise of a waterfall, and his head seemed to be swimming round in a Saturn-ring of streaky light..."
"The sprawled form was all that remained of Arlynne Quistan. She was as dead as the skull on a sinus-doctor's desk."
"What had started with a routine inquiry from Iowa had suddenly blossomed into three exceedingly dead corpses. Show[ing] that life is still full of surprises."
“I didn’t like his face and I told him so,” he snappishly starts... Later on, Race reflects, “Maybe I’m not so hot at repartee.”
"There’s a cold-blooded touch to murder..."
“Like hell — they’ll get me!” he breathed.
“The Duchess,” a reporter for The Sun, could “produce hunches faster than a cigarette machine turns out coffin nails.”
Though his output was small, Paul Cain reached a “high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner,” says Raymond Chandler.
Cardigan lowered his gun. "It’s damned funny that I can’t get a night’s sleep without you guys prowling around here like correspondence-school detectives."
Boy meets corpse, boy loses corpse... "I had never seen anything so unutterably lovely, and perhaps it was her loveliness that was so terrifying."
"A novel of men wanted only by their women - AND THE LAW!"
“He holed up with a helpless lush. A story that builds to a shattering climax!”
"It's Black Friday and for certain people it's a day that never ends. They carry it with them all the time. Like typhoid carriers..."
He looked "as mysterious and hard-boiled as possible in view of the fact that his feet were hurting him more and more all the time.”
“Now you know what it feels like. So how do you like it?”